"Crafting the perfect pitch: Create a message, tailor it to your audience, and include a call to action. Journalists, bloggers, and other PR pros receive dozens of email pitches a day. To make your pitch stand out, take a page from movie marketers. They’re experts in capturing the audience’s attention in three minutes or less and leaving them on …

Maybe the EC should focus on being useful online, rather than being trendy on Facebook? From the ever-good Digital Tonto: "Brands need to become publishers [who] begin with an editorial mission ... [so] stop thinking about content and start thinking about what you have to offer the world ... stop thinking about promoting and start thinking in te…

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

"we're expanding LinkedIn's publishing platform and testing a new feature that lets members write longer form posts about their expertise and professional interests. Posts are shared with your network and the LinkedIn community, and become a part of your LinkedIn profile. " - LinkedIn's Publishing Platform - Overview | LinkedIn Help Center A…

Good perspectives on the limits of audiovisual content re-use: "editor-in-chief of NowThis News ... stressed the need for publishers to create content on a platform-by-platform approach ... bearing in mind the wider context of how content is shared on different networks." In reality, this is no different from text content re-use. You don't necess…

"data-driven journalism doesn’t simply strive to contribute to public policy and culture debates, it aims to end them with a decisive answer. ... In Actually Journalism, news and opinion aren’t needed; to understand something, all the audience needs is this fact, this piece of data, this answer... [but] if Actually Journalism can’t find a way to e…

Great perspective from Ben Thompson on how today's internet flips the bell curve into a power curve, and what that means for anyone producing content which is not best-of-breed: "The implication of news consumption being dominated by the tall skinny part of the power curve is that those who can regularly appear there – the best of the best – are …

"oCam is 100% free Screen Recorder for home and office."

Brian Solis on LinkedIn: "a pattern of best practices ... these pillars represent the cultural capstones that the most innovative companies in the world invest in to stay ahead of the curve." - How to Build a Culture of Innovation Pt. 2: The 12 Pillars of Innovation | LinkedIn

Ice Caves with a drone-mounted GoPro. I’ve got a Gopro, so maybe it’s time to get a drone… via mashable

Perils and pitfalls of augmented reality …

"He says that his goal is to capture the readers attention like these [clickbait] articles, but then get them to interact, think about, share, and meaningfully engage with the content. " - 2014: The future of content marketing - an interview with Brian Solis - Technorati Business

Excellent tool for explaining "the difference between Adaptive, Responsive, Static and Liquid sites ..." - Liquidapsive (Liqui-dap-sive)

Nothing in here about information flow management, but a lot of interesting theory about how evolutionary psychology reinforces the need to support pyramidal organisational structures. "power and winning create a self-reinforcing dynamic. Talented people associate themselves with success and attract other talented people to their side, making con…

A tour of upcoming innovations in "Explanatory journalism... will play a larger role in the digital media landscape ..." illustrate a wider trend: “... content-centric start-ups getting funded. ... web and mobile publishing platforms still present new opportunities for new entrance, new publishers, new journalists, new publications...” - 'FiveTh…

Researchers show that the fatter the annual report, the shakier the company: "they compared the file size ... to various measures of market volatility ... the size of a report a better predictor of subsequent market volatility ... The less material investors and analysts must digest to get valuation-relevant information from company managers, the…

Surprised that after a week this only has about 500 views. Vox.com should be one of the top tech-first news innovators to watch this year

"In order for a smartwatch ad message to work, it has to be delivered at just the right time, place and location that makes sense. What's more, a user has to have opted in to receive such a message. The only way this could happen is via advanced hypertargeting."

I wonder if their EC clients know? "Since 2006, Ketchum... has billed millions of dollars to the Kremlin to advise and assist Moscow with improving its image in the West. ... one former employee says the client is probably not getting its money’s worth: “I can imagine my old Ketchum colleagues holding their heads in anguish ... This is way, way, w…

Surprise surprise... "Circa is developing two types of ads: magazine-style full-screen banners, like Flipboard, and sponsored posts... which look and feel like editorial, created by a separate staff.... One future revenue possibility would be licensing access to Circa's article data to other publishers," - News App Circa Looks to Na…

"The multiverse may even help explain one of the more vexing paradoxes about our world, sometimes called the "anthropic" principle: the fact that we are here to observe it." - Big Bang Discovery Opens Doors to the "Multiverse"

Excellent overview of a complex topic. Makes me think that a lot of EU communications could benefit hugely from reframing itself as "non-profit news", and considering these questions in depth. Alas, the only interesting debate in this field seems to be limited to the US. "The value of online and offline audience engagement is a question that bot…

Looks like one kind of newspaper has a long future - the worst kind: "Supermarket tabloids have long been an icon of unreliability, largely because of their outrageous claims and sensational, melodramatic design. But when individual pieces are shared via social media, these visual and context clues are typically stripped out... Without this conte…

"it looks like web firms operating in the EU are about to face a very different regulatory landscape. This would include much higher fines for breaches of data protection law in the EU, the limited right for citizens to demand the erasure of their personal data, and strict limitations on what can be done with EU citizens’ data outside the union. A…

Is data journalism just another opportunity to bamboozle an audience? Surely publishing the data in interrogable form would be the answer? "data give commentary a false sense of authority since data analysis is inherently prone to bias. The author’s priors, what he believes or wants to be true before looking at the data, often taint results that …

A pretty good idea of where news & journalism will be in 5 years, or deja vu all over again? "the organizations worth backing must be run by tech savvy, top-notch people focused on social distribution of stories that serve an existing but underserved niche audience. ... “They are all technology companies first ... understand how people utilize t…

Worth a look "Meet Haiku Deck, a completely new kind of presentation software. We make telling your story simple, beautiful, and fun."

"Volunteers who chose to participate allowed researchers access to their calling and texting data, the date and time, and the duration of the call. ... We found that phone metadata is unambiguously sensitive, even in a small population and over a short time window. We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership, and more, using solel…

Particularly liked the approach to Search: "We wanted the search page to display in overlay on the page and that, every time we start typing something, the live search bar would return on-the-go results clustered in groups." - Redesigning IMDB — Creative, Product Design, Design Idea — Medium

"when you figure something out that's not trivial ... you're wasting it on Twitter or Facebook. ... The mission of blogging is to empower all of us to go directly to each other with our expertise. So if you know something as well as anyone else, or you learn something or know something that should be shared, then you should share it on your blog. …